Is there anything more idyllic than curling up with a cozy blanket and a good book? Bonus points if there’s a crackling fireplace in front of you. This fall, we’ve added so many incredible new books to our TBR list and we thought it would be fun to round some of them up and share them with you.
You can sign up for our monthly book edit here. Here is this month’s chapter.
We hope you’ll join us in reading these picks, and make sure you’ve joined our Book Club to share your thoughts!
A Girl Is A Body Of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
International-award-winning author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s novel is a sweeping and powerful portrait of a young girl and her family: who they are, what history has taken from them, and―most importantly―how they find their way back to each other.
Just Like You by Nick Hornby
This new release by High Fidelity author Nick Hornby is the warm, wise, highly entertaining 21st-century love story about what happens when the person who makes you happiest is someone you never expected.
Intimations: Six Essays by Zadie Smith
Our love for Zadie Smith knows no bounds. This collection is deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays written during the early months of COVID-19 lockdown.
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing was a masterpiece, and her latest release is no different. This stunning followup is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.
Having and Being Had by Eula Biss
A blend of reportage, research and memoir, Having and Being Had is an essential read for anyone concerned about income inequality. It’s a compulsively readable look at capitalism, class and our fraught relationship to money.
Against The Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
In this story, a young Palestinian refugee slowly becomes radicalized while searching for a better life for her family throughout the Middle East. This powerful novel presents a searing, darkly funny and wholly unique portrait of a Palestinian woman who refuses to be a victim.
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part-family drama, part-social essay, part-picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son and the country they both call home.
Sisters by Daisy Johnson
Sisters is a one-two punch of wild fury and heartache—a taut, powerful and deeply moving account of sibling love and what happens when two sisters must face each other’s darkest impulses.
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
This was the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, and for good reason. Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.
Louisiana Lucky by Julie Pennell
The story stars three sisters who grew up in small-town Louisiana and have always struggled to make ends meet—that is, until they win $204 million. All their dreams come true…or so they think. Louisiana Lucky is a satisfying, page-turning read that you won’t be able to put down.
The Bass Rock by Evie Wyld
The Bass Rock is an account of the lives of three women, separated by time, whose lives revolve around a small town in Scotland. The three timelines are woven around them, detailing their lives through three different eras. Interwoven with themes of witchcraft, abusing relationships, loss, depressions, danger in every corner. Shadows and omens. And the wild beauty of the Bass Rock witnessing everything.
Carry: A Memoir Of Survival On Stolen Land by Toni Jensen
Carry is a gorgeous and brutal memoir about navigating the violent, white-supremacist American capitalism run amok on stolen land. It weaves interdependent narratives of girlhood, motherhood, poverty, family, men and guns into a study of the language of injustice, an untidy and profound unearthing of personal and cultural histories long ignored, long denied, yet very much alive in the Indigenous body.
Monogamy by Sue Miller
What would you do if your entire relationship had been a lie? Annie and Graham have been married for nearly 30 years and living the idyllic life. Or so Annie thought. After Graham dies she finds he has been unfaithful throughout the entirety of their marriage. Annie swirls through bitterness and missed opportunities on her way to an acceptance of a “new sorrow,” while Graham’s Rabelaisian, larger-than-life personality is felt even in his absence. The novel is grounded by vibrant prose, vividly portrayed secondary characters and the resiliency of everlasting love.
Bestiary by K-Ming Chang
Three generations of Taiwanese-American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family’s queer desires, violent impulses and buried secrets.
Cool for America: Stories by Andrew Martin
Expanding the world of his classic-in-the-making debut novel Early Work, Andrew Martin’s Cool for America is a hilarious collection of overlapping stories that explores the dark zone between artistic ambition and its achievement
Amora: Stories by Natalia Borges Polesso
Amora beautifully explores the way women love each other—the atrophy and healing of the female spirit in response to sexual desire and identity. These 33 short stories and poems, crafted with a deliberate delicacy, each capture the candid, private moments of women in love.
The Great Offshore Grounds by Vanessa Veselka
Half-sisters Livy and Cheyenne, both 33, were told a “fairy tale” by their father, Cyril, when they grew up, that one of their mothers wanted children and the other wanted to chase the North Star, and both got what they wanted without marrying him. Moving from Seattle’s underground to the docks of the Far North, from the hideaways of the southern swamps to the storied reaches of the Great Offshore Grounds, this story spins a tale with boundless verve, linguistic vitality and undeniable tenderness.
Pew by Catherine Lacey
One Sunday morning, a mysterious silent figure is found sleeping in a church in an unnamed American town. The congregants call this amnesiac ‘Pew’ and seek to uncover who they are: their age; their gender, their race, their intentions. Are they an orphan, or something worse? What terrible trouble is Pew running from? And why won’t they speak?
